TV Review: 'The Name of the Game' (1968-71)

William Shatner shows up as a typical, early 70's devil worshipper in one episode of The Name of the Game, a ninety-minute drama that was once widely considered the best show on television. Photo courtesy of the IMDb.

The Name of the Game (1968-1971), was a weekly series that aired on NBC.

The Name of the Game was my favorite television show when I was a kid. I liked it better than Star Trek or Lost in Space or even The Monkees (I didn’t count Twilight Zone because it was already in syndicated reruns and wasn’t a current show.) There was something about it that just seemed so grown-up, so cool, so glamorous.

Unfortunately, few people seem to remember it. That’s why I was delighted to find a relatively recent article in the Hollywood Reporter, entitled When Steven Spielberg and Steve Bochco Worked on the Same Series. This article provides a pretty good history of the show, for those who’ve never heard of it.

Produced by Universal Television, this NBC show was—get this—ninety minutes long (less the commercials.) It was a movie-length episode every week. There were other ninety-minute shows in that era—the long-running Western The Virginian springs to mind. NBC also aired popular ninety-minute shows like McCloud and Columbo. Americans used to have much longer attention spans.

The premise of the show revolved around a publishing empire owned by Glenn Howard, a less vulgar version of Hugh Hefner. Howard was played by Gene Barry, who was famous at the time for starring in the series Bat Masterson and Burke’s Law. Barry’s costars were Robert Stack from The Untouchables series, and Tony Franciosa, who was once a bona-fide big screen star, until his personal problems sabotaged his career. He was also briefly married to Shelley Winters, before she got fat.

Each weekly episode focused on the adventures of either Barry, Stack, or Franciosa. Stack played Dan Farrell, editor-in -chief of Howard Publications’s Crime magazine, and Franciosa was Jeff Dillon, a political photojournalist for a LIFE-magazine-like publication called People (years before the real People magazine debuted.) Susan Saint James played Peggy Maxwell, a young research assistant who worked for all three of the major male characters.

The Name of the Game was very topical. The plots revolved around political issues and trends of the day, often featuring murders and kidnappings. An episode called The White Birch takes on the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague; numerous episodes cover the impact of drugs; the episode Ordeal features the death penalty.

Meta Was the Name of the Game

Whether by design or happenstance, the show was often weirdly “meta.” Ordeal, the story of a woman accused of murdering her husband, features a cameo by O.J. Simpson, who would one day stand trial IRL for murdering his former wife. Another episode, The Enemy Before Us, features Franciosa--who had a big drug problem for most of the show’s run--investigating drug dealers in his childhood neighborhood. The two-part episode, I Love You, Billy Baker, which stars Sammy Davis Jr. as a Vegas superstar modeled after Ike Turner, actually features Turner playing himself (along with Tina—they were still together then.) In Shine On, Shine On, Jesse Gil, there’s an appearance by the famous stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, singing a song from the hit Broadway musical that was based on her life.

From ages eight to eleven, I had a crush on Franciosa, the youngest and best-looking of the three male leads, and I was always disappointed when the show featured Stack or Barry. However, my two favorite episodes, as a kid, actually starred Gene Barry, not Franciosa. These are Tarot (1970) and All the Old Familiar Faces (1971). Tarot is about a family of occult practitioners, which includes William Shatner as a devil worshipper (see photo above) and David Carradine as an astrologer. Although the episode has a weak ending, the opening scene and a later seance scene are deliciously creepy. All the Old Familiar Faces is about a plot to kill Glenn Howard by one of his many enemies. It features a macabre folk-rock singing group that shows up to sing a creepy song, in Greek Chorus style, whenever Howard visits one of his old enemies.

Rewatching some of these episodes (of the few that are posted on YouTube), I can see now that a lot of the scripts aren’t as good as I remembered them. There are a lot of unnecessary dialogue/actions/secondary characters to pad out the ninety-minute run time, and the episodes often drag in the middle and feature weak endings.

However, this show is valuable just for the extensive historical record of the massive cultural changes of that bombastic era. It’s also a good resource for television and movie historians, because it features so many famous faces from the Golden Age of Hollywood, such as Edward G. Robinson, Dorothy Lamour, Joan Blondell, Jeanne Crain, Joseph Cotton, Boris Karloff, Rudy Vallee, Hoagy Carmichael, Orson Welles, and Gloria Grahame. I Love You, Billy Baker features Ray Charles, as well as a mini-reunion of the Vegas Rat Pack, which includes Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford.

Ray Charles, Sammy Davis Jr., and Vegas crooner Tony Martin perform together in a fantastic clip from the two-part episode, I Love You, Billy Baker,which also featured cameos from members of The Rat Pack.

Very Early Spielberg

Behind the screen, The Name of the Game employed producers and directors who've had a huge impact on televison and/or the cinema. Leslie Stevens, the creator of the original Outer Limits, was an executive producer, and he also directed three episodes. Leo Penn, the father of Sean Penn, directed four episodes. The British horror director John Lewellyn Moxely, who directed the classic Christopher Lee film, City of the Dead (1960), helmed four episodes also. And one episode, the sci-fi-themed LA 2017, was indeed directed by a young film school dropout named Steven Spielberg.

The series also gave prominent roles to black actors at a time when there were not many spots for them on prestigous TV dramas: Ossie Davis, Yaphet Kotto, Percy Rodriguez, Ivan Dixon, Brock Peters, and Roscoe Lee Brown all show up as guest stars in the series.

Unfortunately, The Name of the Game isn’t available on official DVD. Viewers can find various DVD collections on bootleg sites, but those don’t have the full 76 episodes (and are often poor-quality VHS rips recorded from cut-down syndicated reruns.) A few episodes, including Tarot and All the Old Familiar Faces, can be found on YouTube, in very poor quality. The Shout Factory tried to release the first season a few years ago, but failed, probably due to music rights, which are the usual suspects keeping many classic productions from being released.